Hello: I am new to 3d modeling and I am thinking about buying Carrara. This program looks powerfull enough for me to be able to enjoy creating 3d objects as well as in my price range. I had thought about buying one of the smaller programs but I thought I would do better putting the money into a larger program. The one thing that makes me a little leary of buying Carrara is I can not find any 3rd party books on learning Carrara. Anyone out there know of a good sourse for books on learning Carrar? Thanks

You'll read complaints about the C manuals but personally I think they're pretty good, especially as a broad overview of what the package can do. There were two books out on Cv1 that are still (mostly) relevant (search on Carrara in the Books section at Amazon). Also consider online training at http://apex.vtc.com/ (there is a course on C that also comes on CD (see the eovia home page for details). There are also several good books out that cover 3d in more general terms and sometimes I've found these books to be the most helpful of all (give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to fish and he'll always have food). Adam Watkins is a good author in my opinion. Mark Giambruno's book is great as well, especially if you want to build something for your demo reel (it doesn't specifically cover C but with a little effort I think you can apply much of it to C anyway). Plus you can search this renderosity forum for specific topics (last night I was looking up "glass") and there are also any number of online tutorials from the likes of Litst: http://www.chez.com/litst/ (plus material on eovia's web site) Plus a Carrara CD now on v1.1 that is being sold in the Renderosity marketplace. At one point I upgraded from Inspire to Lightwave partly because there were so many Lightwave books on the market but then I realized that with Lightwave to some extent you need to read all those books before you can do anything. Fortunately C is a bit more approachable than that. C is missing some advanced features compared to the likes of Lightwave and C4D (although it does have a very advanced materials system and in certain areas is even better than some of the higher-end packages) but is a lot of fun to use and can create great looking output. I think that starting with C would be a good choice and later if you outgrow it you can always move on up to one of the big boys (and the good news is that the big boy pricing seems to heading down and the big boy vendors are now making more of an effort to make their packages more accessible). Even if you could justify the purchase price I wouldn't necessarily recommend starting with Lightwave unless you were training for a job at a studio that used Lightwave. I find C4D more approachable than Lightwave but for a newbie I think the Carrara community is probably going to more helpful. You might even be able to start with the Basics version which is very affordable (I haven't tried it so I'm not sure what all has been left out).

Hi: Thank very much. that is the information I need. I had a demo of 3dMax. Even the plugins are out of my price range. Slick program but out of my league. I think Carrara will be able to give me the power I need but a little more usable for a newbe such as me. Deborah

I think Carrara Studio is excellent for newbies to 3d. I bought Carrara when it went to version 2 and have never regretted buying it. Its fast become my favourite 3d app and I just love the plugins that are available for it too.

bijouchat do you use tree druid? And if so can I get some tips on texturing the trees? The manual is doing nothing but confuse me, says to drag the bars but they do not drag...lol Thanks, Marque

Carrara Ver. 1.1 with Tree Druid plugin. Marque

yes I use Tree Druid Marque (sometimes in combo with Anything Grows, which is a great way to plant a more realistic forest)... in fact I often use some of Kromekat's stuff in the Marketplace here to texture them, I will post some screenshots here of my shader if you like :) the worst part is understanding how transparency works for leaves (how it works for everything really, transparency just isn't simple in Carrara)... but once you have that one down its really easy. (and by looking at a shader, you just can copy how it works anyway!)They have some help with shaders on the zenstar page too. Give me a bit, and I will post screenshots of my tree shader. also a tip, your poser figures have to be much bigger so they accept transparency well too. I realised there's a bug with that at small sizes.

basically, when applying these shaders, you have to use the those blue pulldown menus and choose the right options you see here. (I think you know that, but not sure, so I'm getting basic there) From the top, you have to choose the Layers list, that way you get the option to use Parametric mapping and can see all the materials that are defined already in the trees that Tree Druid generates. No need to uvmap them, they are uvmapped already and easy to texture. :) Layers list will give you those little "plus" + signs at the bottom of each material, click on that plus sign in the Leaves material to get the Cover all Layer option to make the transparency mask for leaves that you see here. I save these shaders to my library of shaders too, so I can easily reuse them on other trees. :) You do that by dragging the top of the shader and dropping into the left side library where you see the shaders (just make a directory for your own shaders there)and apply by dragging the shader onto the tree shader you want to shade. If you are doing this with multiple instances of trees used as tip objects, apply your shader to the plane or object that is using Anything Grows, it will then shade the tip object trees perfectly. (I hide the anything grows terrain or plane then, so you can't see that part anymore.) I'm almost done with a render using some of these tips, that I will post. I got the idea of using Anything Grows to easily make multiple trees for forest when I saw a Lightwave tutorial in a magazine to do a similar thing with a hair plugin to create natural scenery. Works GREAT in Carrara too!

Don't worry about getting too basic...lol The info I downloaded from his site said something about dragging the bar down, does he just mean opening up the options? Thanks for the great pictures! I haven't messed with Carrara for a long time, and I don't want to upgrade to the standalone version of Tree Druid, though I may if it works well enough. Thanks, Marque

Hi Marque, yeah, on the plus sign or a blue menu option, you click and hold the mouse button down so you see the selections you can choose from in the list. The shaders are very powerful in Carrara, don't be afraid to experiment with them to make cool effects. I recently got the standalone version of tree druid, to make different tree presets to use in Carrara... but I think you don't need it at first. First get used to working with the Carrara plugin, and then you can upgrade to the standalone if you want to make TDD files for use in Carrara Tree Druid, or obj files if you want. (for me, I got it to make TDD files, as I'm happy using the plugin most of the time!) I think the instructions aren't very clear on the site... let me try and simplify it. make a tree with tree druid in the assemble room. change to the shader room by clicking the paintbrush at the upper right corner of the screen. Multchannel will be diplayed on the top of the shader in the blue pulldown menu. click on it, using the pull down menu and click on Complex Shaders, and choose Layers List. Multichannel will now be underneath Layers list. Click on Multichannel again, and choose Parametric mapping. its going to fall down with a list of your tree materials for applying shaders. Where it says Parametric Mapping apply to Whole Object, underneath it will be the Multichannel again. click on the box (not the blue dropdown menu)where you see Multichannel so its highlighted in yellow. Press shift key, hold shift down, and click and drag the yellow highlighted box, to where you see the next Parametric mapping (the Plus sign underneath the Parametric mapping part) you'll have copied the Mulitchannel part of the shader to a new section! You don't need the part of this shader that applies to the entire object, I have deleted it by highlighting that one in yellow and hitting the Delete key. Some of you might need it, I just don't and so I got rid of it. You can as well make it not do anything by making all its options None, as well. You just need the tree materials to shade it. When you have textured the trunk as you like, you can copy by highlighting and shift click dragging its Multichannel shader again to texture the boughs and limbs with the same shader, saves you some work. Hope I'm clearer here! take care, Robin